Online Series | 2021 Wallace Seminars on Collections and Collecting
From The Wallace Collection:
2021 Wallace Collection Seminars on the History of Collections and Collecting
Online, The Wallace Collection, London, last Monday of the Month, 17.30
This seminar series was established in 2006 as part of the Wallace Collection’s commitment to the research and study of the history of collections and collecting, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Paris and London. The seminars—normally held on the last Monday of every month during the calendar year, excluding August and December—act as a forum for the presentation and discussion of new research into the history of collecting. Seminars are open to curators, academics, historians, archivists, and all those with an interest in the subject. Papers are generally 45–60 minutes long.
Please note that the seminars will take place on Zoom and will not be held at the Wallace Collection.
Monday, 22 February
Sara Ayres (Fellow at the Centre for Privacy Studies, University of Copenhagen), Descriptions of Collections and Their Display at the Stuart Court in 1669 in a Manuscript Account of Prince George of Denmark’s Grand Tour (1668–70)
Monday, 29 March
Janet M. Brooke (Independent Scholar, Montreal), The Gilded Age in Canada: Reconstructing the Life and Afterlife of the Sir William Van Horne Collection
Monday, 26 April
Ellinoor Bergvelt (Guest Researcher, University of Amsterdam / Research Fellow, Dulwich Picture Gallery), The Dutch King Willem II (1792–1849) as Collector and Source of Some Important Pictures in The Wallace Collection
Monday, 24 May
Krystle Attard Trevisan (PhD Candidate, Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London), The ‘Primo Costo’ inventory of Count Saverio Marchese (1757–1833): Mapping the Print Market in Malta and Its European Connections
Monday, 28 June
Timothy Schroder (Trustee, The Wallace Collection), Inside the Dragon’s Lair: Henry VIII’s Kunstkammer at Whitehall Palace
Monday, 26 July
Ana Mónica da Silva Rolo (Archaeologist, Archaeology Centre UNIARQ, Lisbon University) and Noé Conejo Delgado (Archaeologist, Numismatist, Archaeology Centre UNIARQ, Lisbon University), A Dactyliothec from Pietro Bracci in the Portuguese Royal Family’s Collections: A Different Look at Art Collecting
Monday, 27 September
Andrea Morgan (PhD Candidate, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario), Collecting and Displaying Rembrandt’s Pictures in Eighteenth– and Nineteenth–Century England: Charles Jennens of Gopsall Hall and the ‘Rembrandt Room’ at Stowe
Monday, 25 October
Mark Hall (Collections Officer for Culture Perth & Kinross, Perth Museum & Art Gallery), The Perth Literary and Antiquarian Society, 1784–1914: Collecting Scotland, Collecting the World
Monday, 29 November
Rachel Peat (Assistant Curator of Non-European Works of Art, Royal Collection Trust, London), ‘A Most Distinguished Collector and Patron’: Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh and Japanese Art, 1869–1900
Online Talk | Robert Darnton, Pirating and Publishing
This Wednesday, from the Boston Athenæum:
Book Talk: Pirating and Publishing: The Book Trade in the Age of Enlightenment
Robert Darnton in Conversation with John Buchtel
3 February 2021, 6:00pm (EST)
In the late-18th century, a group of publishers in what historian Robert Darnton calls the ‘Fertile Crescent’ countries located along the French border, stretching from Holland to Switzerland pirated the works of prominent (and often banned) French writers and distributed them in France, where laws governing piracy were in flux and any notion of ‘copyright’ very much in its infancy. Piracy was entirely legal and everyone acknowledged tacitly or openly that these pirated editions of works by Rousseau, Voltaire, and Diderot, among other luminaries, supplied a growing readership within France, one whose needs could not be met by the monopolistic and tightly controlled Paris Guild.
Pirating and Publishing: The Book Trade in the Age of Enlightenment focuses on a publisher in Switzerland, one of the largest and whose archives are the most complete. Through the lens of this concern, Darnton offers a sweeping view of the world of writing, publishing, and especially bookselling in pre-Revolutionary France—a vibrantly detailed inside look at a cut-throat industry that was struggling to keep up with the times and, if possible, make a profit off them. Featuring a fascinating cast of characters lofty idealists and down-and-dirty opportunists this new book expands upon on Darnton’s celebrated work on book-publishing in France, most recently found in A Literary Tour de France. Pirating and Publishing reveals how and why piracy brought the Enlightenment to every corner of France, feeding the ideas that would explode into revolution.
Registration is requested. Boston Athenæum Members and VESP holders: free. Visitors: $5.
Robert Darnton is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and University Librarian, Emeritus of Harvard University, and the author of The Great Cat Massacre (1984) and A Literary Tour de France (2018), among others.
John Buchtel is Curator of Rare Books and Head of Special Collections at the Boston Athenaeum.
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Robert Darnton, Pirating and Publishing: The Book Trade in the Age of Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 400 pages, ISBN: 978-0195144529, $35.
C O N T E N T S
Introduction
Publishing
1 The Rules of the Game and How the Game was Played
2 The Landscape in Paris
3 The Fertile Crescent
Pirating
4 How to Pirate a Book
5 Portraits of Pirates and Their Businesses
6 Underground Geneva
7 A Confederation of Pirates
8 The Struggle to Pirate Rousseau and Voltaire
Inside a Swiss Publishing House
9 Business as Usual
10 Our Man in Paris
11 Relations with Authors
12 Making and Losing Money
Conclusion
Online Panel | Print Culture and Propaganda in the American Revolution
Christie’s presents this free online panel (via Zoom) in conjunction with its Americana week:
Print Culture and Propaganda in the American Revolution: Selections from the Collection of Ambassador J. William Middendorf
Tuesday, 19 January 2021, noon (EST)
Moderated by Peter Klarnet, Senior Specialist, with a tribute by John Hays, Deputy Chairman
Panelists
• Philip Mead (Director of Curatorial Affairs and Chief Historian, Museum of the American Revolution, Philadelphia)
• Nancy Siegel (Professor of Art History and Museum Studies Coordinator, Towson University, Towson, Maryland)
• Allison Stagg
• Amy Torbert (Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Assistant Curator of American Art, Saint Louis Art Museum)
Image: Lot 306 of sale 18947. Phillip Dawe, engraver, The Bostonian’s Paying the Excise Man or Tarring and Feathering (London: Robert Sayer & John Bennett, 1774; Collection of Ambassador J. William Middendorf II).
Online Lecture | John Whitehead, Japanese Lacquer on French Furniture
From the FHS announcement:
John Whitehead, The Use of Japanese Lacquer on French 18th-Century Furniture
Furniture History Society Online Lecture, Sunday, 17 January 2021, 19.00 (GMT)
Japanese lacquer has been recognised in Europe as the best of all Asian lacquers since the seventeenth century, and in the eighteenth century it was much used to decorate furniture in France and elsewhere. Paris marchands-merciers and ébénistes clearly had no respect for the integrity of pieces, as we would have now, and created some delightful furniture with chopped-up pieces of lacquer. This subject was first discussed by the FHS at a memorable symposium in 1988 and continues to amuse us today.
John Whitehead is a dealer in French eighteenth-century decorative arts, with an emphasis on Sèvres porcelain. He is the author of The French Interior in the Eighteenth Century (1992) and two books on eighteenth century Sèvres porcelain (2010). With Oliver Impey, he has written on Japanese lacquer and French furniture, including the entry in the exhibition catalogue, William Beckford, 1760–1844: An Eye for the Magnificent (2001).
This event is free for FHS members and £5 for non-members; please contact events@furniturehistorysociety.org for tickets.
Research Lunch | Rebecca Tropp on the Picturesque and Country Houses
This talk was slated for last March; it’s been rescheduled as an online event, sponsored by the Mellon Centre:
Rebecca Tropp, Accommodating the Picturesque: The Country Houses of James Wyatt, John Nash, and Sir John Soane, 1793–1815
(Zoom) Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, 29 January 2021
James Wyatt, Ashridge House, commissioned by the 7th Earl of Bridgewater.
Whilst much has been written about the development of Picturesque theory at the end of the eighteenth century, regarding both the landscape itself and prescriptions for the sitting of buildings within it, these discussions have generally been limited to two-dimensional snapshots, such as those represented in Humphry Repton’s Red Books. This paper, based upon ongoing research for a doctoral dissertation, seeks to push beyond the visual to investigate some of the physical implications and repercussions of the Picturesque ideal – the intersection between the visual two-dimensional picture-plane and the practical three-dimensional architectural response – on the design and construction of country houses at the turn of the nineteenth century.
Focusing on the work of James Wyatt (1746–1813), John Nash (1752–1835), and Sir John Soane (1753–1837), and limiting investigation to those country houses designed during the pivotal period from 1793 to 1815, the paper investigates two specific implications related to the lowering of the principal floor from piano nobile to ground level, as part of a general repositioning of the house within the landscape. First is the use of level changes within the ground floor—the inclusion of a few steps up or down in entrance halls or between rooms, as distinct from staircases between floors—considering some possible reasons for their incorporation and the purposes they served. Second, and sometimes connected to these level changes, is an increase in permeability between interior and exterior, through the use of full-length windows, loggias and attached conservatories—social/botanical spaces that were first incorporated into the design of the house during this period. Taken together, these developments furthered the evolving relationship between house and landscape and, as a result, the experience of moving through and between those spaces.
Rebecca Tropp is currently finishing her PhD in History of Art at St John’s College, University of Cambridge, working under the supervision of Dr Frank Salmon. She completed her MPhil in History of Art and Architecture at Cambridge in 2015, investigating recurring spatial arrangements and patterns of movement in the country houses of John Nash. Prior to commencing postgraduate studies in the UK, she received her bachelor’s degree from Columbia University in New York, where she majored in the History and Theory of Architecture.
Xavier Salomon on Clodion’s Dance of Time
The Dance of Time, Three Nymphs Supporting a Clock, movement by Jean-Baptiste Lepaute, sculpture by Claude Michel Clodion, 1788, terracotta, gilt brass, and glass, H.: 41 inches (New York: The Frick Collection, bequest of Winthrop Kellogg Edey) Photo: Michael Bodycomb.
A very Happy New Year to all of you! I should have posted news of this brief talk earlier, but it will be available on YouTube whenever you might have the time and inclination to watch. I also point out the series more generally for those of you always looking for teaching resources. Past installments (typically 20 minutes) address paintings by Gainsborough, Stubbs, Romney, Tiepolo, Boucher, and Chardin, along with extraordinary decorative arts objects (and plenty of works beyond the eighteenth century). –CH
Xavier Salomon on Clodion’s Dance of Time
YouTube, 1 January 2021, 5pm (EST)
This week’s episode of Cocktails with a Curator toasts the new year with Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator Xavier F. Salomon as he examines a masterpiece of both sculpture and clockmaking: The Dance of Time, by Clodion (Claude Michel) and Jean-Baptiste Lepaute. In this 18th-century timepiece, three terracotta nymphs or Hours dance in a circle around an exquisite mechanism enclosed in a glass globe. The Frick has one of the country’s most important collections of clocks, many of which came to the museum through a gift from Winthrop Kellogg Edey. Welcome 2021 by raising a Metropolitan cocktail—Happy New Year!
New Book | The Place of Many Moods: Udaipur’s Painted Lands
From Princeton UP:
Dipti Khera, The Place of Many Moods: Udaipur’s Painted Lands and India’s Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 232 pages, ISBN , $65 / £54.
In the long eighteenth century, artists from Udaipur, a city of lakes in northwestern India, specialized in depicting the vivid sensory ambience of its historic palaces, reservoirs, temples, bazaars, and durbars. As Mughal imperial authority weakened by the late 1600s and the British colonial economy became paramount by the 1830s, new patrons and mobile professionals reshaped urban cultures and artistic genres across early modern India. The Place of Many Moods explores how Udaipur’s artworks—monumental court paintings, royal portraits, Jain letter scrolls, devotional manuscripts, cartographic artifacts, and architectural drawings—represent the period’s major aesthetic, intellectual, and political shifts. Dipti Khera shows that these immersive objects powerfully convey the bhava—the feel, emotion, and mood—of specific places, revealing visions of pleasure, plenitude, and praise. These memorialized moods confront the ways colonial histories have recounted Oriental decadence, shaping how a culture and time are perceived.
Illuminating the close relationship between painting and poetry, and the ties among art, architecture, literature, politics, ecology, trade, and religion, Khera examines how Udaipur’s painters aesthetically enticed audiences of courtly connoisseurs, itinerant monks, and mercantile collectives to forge bonds of belonging to real locales in the present and to long for idealized futures. Their pioneering pictures sought to stir such emotions as love, awe, abundance, and wonder, emphasizing the senses, spaces, and sociability essential to the efficacy of objects and expressions of territoriality.
The Place of Many Moods uncovers an influential creative legacy of evocative beauty that raises broader questions about how emotions and artifacts operate in constituting history and subjectivity, politics and place.
Dipti Khera is associate professor in the Department of Art History and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.
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Celebrating Dipti Khera’s The Place of Many Moods
Friday, 4 December 2020, live-streamed at 11:00am ET
Please join the Institute of Fine Arts in conversation with Dipti Khera about her new book The Place of Many Moods: Udaipur’s Painted Lands and India’s Eighteenth Century. Responding to the book will be Vittoria Di Palma, Associate Professor of Architectural History and Art History at the University of Southern California, and Kavita Singh, Professor of Art History at the School of Arts and Aesthetics of Jawaharlal Nehru University. RSVP to receive the webinar link for this live-streamed event.
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Note (added 23 November 2020) — The original posting did not include information on the live-streamed event.
Today | HECAA Emerging Scholars Showcase
HECAA Emerging Scholars Showcase
Online, Saturday, 7 November 2020, 2:00–3:30pm (EST)
The first HECAA Emerging Scholars Showcase begins today at 2pm EST. Please join us via zoom to hear our first seven emerging scholars present their research. Each participant will present for 3–5 minutes, and after the presentations, we will host a question and answer session. The seven presenters and their presentation titles are listed below. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact Dani Ezor (dezor@smu.edu).
Best regards,
HECAA Board
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Zoom link: https://smu.zoom.us/j/95131749838
Meeting ID: 951 3174 9838
• Aditi Gupta, (Jawaharlal Nehru University), Imperial Collection of J.B Gentil: A Frenchman’s Quest for Knowledge Production on India
• Nele Lüttmann (Trinity College Dublin), German Architects in Britain and Ireland, 1700–1750
• Agnieszka Anna Ficek (CUNY Graduate Center), Picturing the Peruvienne: The Exotic and Erotic in Mme de Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Peruvienne
• María del Castillo García Romero (University of Seville), Feminae Devotae: Artistic Portraits on Religious Female Culture in Baja Andalusia during the Eighteenth Century
• Michael Hartman (University of Delaware), Bodies and Vision in the North American Landscape
• Archie Manister-O’Neill (Courtauld Institute of Art), In Search of Rebecca Magg: Tracing the History of Three Hand-Crafted Dolls (ca. 1786) Kept in the Bristol Archive
• Ashley Hannebrink (Harvard University), Shaping the Self: Sculpture and the Interior in Eighteenth-Century France
HECAA Emerging Scholars Showcase
George Lambert, Classical Landscape, 1745, oil on canvas, 41 × 46 inches
(London: Tate)
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HECAA Emerging Scholars Showcase
Online, Saturday, 7 November 2020, 2:00–3:30pm (EST)
Please mark your calendars for the first HECAA Emerging Scholars Showcase on Saturday, November 7, from 2:00 to 3:30pm EST. We will hear from our first seven emerging scholars present their research in 3– to 5–minute presentations, after which we will open up the floor to questions and comments. The intention of these showcases is to create networking opportunities, and we look forward to your audience participation in support of our emerging scholars.
We received an overwhelming number of applications, ranging geographically from China, India, and Australia, to Brazil, Europe, and across the USA. The topics likewise range in their geographical origin, theoretical approach, materials, techniques, and methods. We will also hold two additional showcases on 6 February 2021 and 17 April 2021.
Registration is not required. A Zoom link will be sent out to all HECAA members the week before November 7. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact Dani Ezor (dezor@smu.edu). Thank you!
Public Lecture Course | Ceramics in Britain
The series, originally scheduled for the spring, will now take place online; from the Mellon Centre:
Public Lecture Course, Ceramics in Britain, 1750 to Now
Online, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, Thursdays, 5 November — 10 December 2020
Pre-recorded lectures to be released weekly at 3pm GMT on Thursdays and a live Q&A (Zoom) on 10 December 2020 at 6pm GMT
This course, delivered by experts in the field, will explore five key influential developments in the history of British ceramics since the mid-eighteenth century, examining the multiple ways in which innovators, entrepreneurs, and artists have reinvigorated the field. While the story of ceramics is a global one, Britain has played a leading role in the last three centuries, a period in which British invention has shaped developments and brought constant renewal to the industry.
By 1750, ceramics of different types were available to all levels of society. However, the uniquely British innovation of combining print culture and ceramics, transfer-printing political propaganda, and the graphic satire of London’s leading caricaturists onto earthenware, enabled these contemporary controversial messages to be understood by all classes. During the same period, scientific experimentation by Josiah Wedgwood led to the invention of new bodies and glazes, many copying the ceramics and glass of ancient Greece and Rome. His range and ambition, summed up by his aim to become ‘Vase Maker General to the Universe’, helped to change ceramic tastes to an unprecedented degree.
The production of an abundance of styles characterised the nineteenth century. However, blue and white—one of the most distinctive visual effects in ceramics—became, and remained, more popular than any other. Heavily influenced by porcelain exported from Asia, Britain became the leading ceramic producer of this style, driving international trade and retail opportunities. ‘Chinamania’ gripped the nation; debates about taste and authenticity drove collectors, consumers, and creators.
Ceramics was largely unaffected by the first wave of anti-industrialism in England. Neither William Morris nor the Arts and Crafts movement fully established a new type of pottery. However, an urge to turn away from the industrially-produced ceramics of the late nineteenth century, combined with a renewed interest in form, earlier Chinese ceramics, and abstract art, gave rise to a wave of pioneering British potters who insisted on the importance of the handmade and established the role of the ‘artist-potter’. This philosophy was widely popularised by the influential studio potter, Bernard Leach, who spent formative periods in China and Japan and wrote that ‘all my life I have been a courier between East and West’.
While studio ceramics continue to flourish today, global economics and advanced production technology have greatly impacted the ceramics industry in Staffordshire, the traditional heartland of British ceramics production. Artists have played a key role in documenting and commentating on these changes. The course will conclude with an artist’s examination of the decline of ceramic manufacturing and its associated artisanal skills, emphasising the importance of sustaining the intangible heritage of this longstanding and important industry.
No prior art historical knowledge is necessary.
Thursday, 5 November
Patricia Ferguson (Project Curator, British Museum), Pots with Attitude: British Satire on Ceramics, 1750–1820
Thursday, 12 November
Catrin Jones (Chief Curator, Wedgwood Museum), Josiah Wedgwood: Experimentation and Innovation
Thursday, 19 November
Rebecca Wallis (Curator, National Trust, London and South East), ‘Blue and White’ in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Beyond
Thursday, 26 November
Simon Olding (Director of the Crafts Study Centre, University for the Creative Arts, Farnham), ‘Beyond East and West’: The Founding of British Studio Ceramics
Thursday, 3 December
Neil Brownsword (Artist and Professor of Ceramics, Staffordshire University), Obsolescence and Renewal: Reimagining North Staffordshire’s Ceramic Heritage
Thursday, 10 December
Ceramics in Britain: Live Q&A
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